Search Results: Human Rights

Social media drove the Arab Spring, the story goes. If it weren’t for viral posts in Tunisia setting off a cascade of dominoes across the region change would never have arrived. For a brief period, the arrival of social media giant Facebook in countries with low connectivity or strict freedom of the press and internet meant change was afoot.

Loneliness is framed in a quintessentially liberal way: as a health-related issue affecting individuals. But loneliness is a by-product of the liberal social order; by elevating the market above all else and reducing notions of freedom to individual rights, notions of value are now boiled down to crude forms of economic reductionism.

A robust human rights framework would hold government to account in its own deployment of technology such as 'robodebt'. It would also provide protections against the government's increasing attempts to control data through legislation — where data is collected and deployed using diverse technologies.

We are already suffering from the effects of global warming and the intensification of extreme weather events, and things are going to get worse. The question now is what we do to both limit the damage and adapt to the inevitable. Fortunately many of the actions that we must take will actually make our lives better.

Religious freedoms extend only so far as they do not contradict the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. While all Australians should enjoy religious freedom, they also bear the right to non-discrimination and to the highest attainable standard of health. It is also unclear how positive discrimination is related to practising a religion.

Both secularists and religious implicitly endorse the premise that homosexuality and Christianity are incompatible. This indicates to LGBT Christians that they are anomalous, tolerated at best, and to same sex attracted young people raised in faith traditions that they must choose between their sexual orientation and their faith.

The charge brought against Kavanaugh invites reflection on what past actions and allegations should disqualify a person from holding public office. And in a society where increasingly traces of our past actions will be indelibly recorded, what scope should there be for remission and wiping the slate clean of past offences?

While the Australian Jewish population is about 0.4 per cent, they constitute about 12.5 per cent of the Wentworth electorate, with Christianity the largest group overall (43.8 per cent). It is highly likely the LNP is counting on the embassy stunt to result in more votes in the Wentworth by-election. But the political ramifications are much broader.

Most of the requests wanted my slant on the racist cartoon, the blackface incident or the girl who wouldn't stand for the anthem. They weren't interested in delving into the systemic issues which led to most of those other situations. Most wanted Aboriginal opinion for the purposes of producing clickbait.

Tone policing describes when someone from a minority group expresses thoughts on oppression, but a person dismisses the content of their opinion in favour of commenting on how they said it. Anger in particular is tone policed. While men are encouraged to express their anger, women are socialised to feel like they can't be angry at all.

The link Manne makes between Australian treatment of people seeking protection and the abiding cultural demand to control outsiders is illuminating, and his description of the 'Canberra mindset' is persuasive. But the resistance from the sector to negotiation about Manus and Nauru has more complex roots than Manne allows.

The EU is facing the consequences of its own actions. It will not link political violence to migration, and wishes to maintain its humanitarian façade, so there is little opposition to what Salvini and his ilk are perpetrating against human rights. The web is now so tangled it is no longer a mere issue of racism.